Ting Wireless Saves Mom Some Big Bucks

Ting Wireless Saves Mom Some Big BucksLike everyone else, my cell phone bill is too high.  There are three phones on my plan and one of them is for my mom who uses her phone maybe once every two months for a few minutes.  I have AT&T and that translates to a larger expense than I think it’s worth.  This is how I found out about Ting Wireless which is a very low cost provider of mobile phone service.

Ting is owned by a company called Tucows which I knew of from various domain registration activities over the years.  They use the Sprint network for CDMA traffic and T-Mobile for GSM.  They support most unlocked phones from the major carriers so if you already have a phone, it can likely be transported to Ting and you would simply swap out the SIM cards.  I have AT&T and figured why not use the phone she already had so I used this link to start the unlock process.

Ting pricing is excellent for a low activity user like my mom.  The Ting monthly fee is $6 for a single phone.  If she doesn’t use her phone all month, that’s the bill.  They do add tax but none of the silly administrative fees that AT&T adds.  If she uses her phone for under 100 minutes during the billing month, that adds $3 to the bill.  She doesn’t use texting let alone the data network, so the highest this bill will ever be is $9 plus tax.  Oh, and no contract either.  Cancel whenever you want.

As I was looking at ways to cut the bill, I took a look at Sprint as they promise to cut your bill in half.  The rates were indeed good, and I almost took them up on their offer, but then interfaced with customer service.  It was a disaster.  I don’t know where they were located but could not understand them very well and most importantly, they couldn’t address my issue.  Thirty minutes into the conversation, I decided not to pursue Sprint.  All because of that experience.  A service like a mobile phone carrier needs to have spot on customer service.  It’s so important and in this case, cost them a customer.

I speak to the Sprint experience because I also had to call Ting customer service at midnight to ask some questions.  A very nice person answered the phone.  No waiting.  Understood him perfectly and he answered all my questions.  That’s how customer service should work.

Ting isn’t perfect for everyone.  f you are a high use person, like me, Ting might not be the right carrier.  The two phones that we have left on the AT&T plan use up to 5GB of data monthly and over 1000 texts with a few thousand minutes of talk.  Ting is actually more expensive for those two phones, so I called AT&T and they put me over to a retention specialist that was able to slash the cost of my bill by $20 per month.

Between Ting and the retention specialist, my monthly bill decreased by over $30 monthly or close to $400 per year.  Not bad for a few hours of work.

If you would like to read a good article on phone mounts which you can use while saving all that money on Ting, you may view it here.